Snaps.

When I started working as an usher at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, we had an honest-to-goodness electromagnet in our office. It was used to wipe clean film without manually opening a guest's camera, but mostly, we just played with it. My favourite game was to see how far we could hold the magnet from the metal waste-paper bin to make it clatter across the floor and slam into the device.

It was very unusual to have to destroy film. It rarely came to that, and when it did, it was the manager's Schadenfreude-filled responsibility. As the theatre-goers arrived, we told them not to use their cameras, there was a bilingual announcement before the show, and if a flash went off, we ushers were trained to descend like samurai and tell them to knock it the hell off. It was only the defiant repeat photographer that had his or her camera confiscated and the film destroyed.

The core problem involves the image, of course. The set, the lighting design, and the staging are all protected by copyrights, and the performers are very hesitant to not have control over their images.

Besides the more legal stuff, it's hella distracting to an actor when a flash goes off. If you've ever been in a spotlight, you know that you're working half-blinded; the lights flood your retinas to the point where the audience disappears into an inky abyss. When a flash comes out of that void, it can be very discombobulating. I mean, these performers are seasoned professionals - they're not going to wander, dazed, fall off the stage and into the orchestra pit - but it takes a lot of mental energy to do these shows, and a distraction is a distraction.

It's different, now, with accessible digital cameras and "cameras" in every phone. Where the image was the primary problem and the flash was secondary, now, we have a tertiary issue of audience distraction from glowing LCD screens. Our lizard brains (moth brains?) are so drawn to glowing screens, no matter how amazing the show is, live, on stage, it's very difficult to look away from the tiny-but-shiny glow three rows ahead.

Let me end with this thought: as a spectator, why must we document shows?

Is it to remind ourselves we were there? Maybe the show's not worth going to if we're worried we'll forget.

Is it to share the experience with others? If so, is even a little bit of sharing also showing off? Honestly?

If it's because we're enjoying the show so much, we'll want to see it again, let's consider what quality of experience that will be: the person recording the show is cheated out of the real deal, distracted by the task of recording a tiny, 2D image instead of enjoying the live performance.

Maybe we do it simply because we can. Perhaps soon the novelty of "document & share" will wear off and we can watch a show like a Greek in an ancient open-air amphitheatre would have. I have to be patient. We may come to our senses in a few decades.

I kinda like thinking about the fleeting beauty of a live experience. It's bittersweet, but I love the bittersweet.

Bombshell?

I started watching Castle this year. It was purely to sate the Fillion Withdrawal I felt after finishing Firefly. I don't usually watch what I call "murder shows," but Castle had some charm and humour, so I was satisfied.

(Beef that has since been resolved: Castle was dragging out the will they/won't they trope way too long. I didn't care if they ever got together, and it was getting hamfisted. Also, the whole "Castle's-family-is-mirroring-a-situation-from-the-precinct" stuff is played out.)

I recently read an article that referred to Fillion's co-star, Stana Katic, as a "bombshell."

I started thinking about  that word, bombshell.

When I think of a bombshell, I think curves. I think pin-ups and victory rolls. Katic is tall and extremely slender. Bombshell is not an adjective I would use to describe her. Willowy, maybe.

Scarlett Johansson, Salma Hayek, and Joan Holloway* qualify. Katic has cornered the market on a strange girlish smoulder, but not bombshell.

Fillion's still a hunk. No argument there.

*Yes, I mean Holloway. Not Hendricks.

"Yeah, That's Right: My Name's Yauch."

I thought I was having a fever dream when I heard that Adam Yauch had died. I was travelling and had come down with a virus, so I woke up from an afternoon nap in my hotel room, clammy and achy and I turned on the TV to see what time it was. It was on Much Music and the super in the bottom right-hand corner said "RIP MCA." I really thought I was dreaming. I left a fevered, rambling phone message to my closest Beastie Boys fan friend, M.

In 2009, Yauch announced that he had cancer in one of his salivary glands and not long ago denied reports that he was cancer-free. He didn't attend the recent Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction of the Beastie Boys, and all three Boys have been conspicuously missing from the first two videos from their newest album, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two. I didn't put two and two together - I just thought they were being reclusive. I didn't realise it was because MCA was so ill he couldn't appear (no pun intended). I guess I wasn't paying close enough attention.

There are many reasons his death is tragic.

To begin, the very human loss of a young man with a young family to a cancer that he understood was very treatable. Yauch also had a noble social conscience. A Buddhist, he was active in Tibetan independence protests and worked to support Tibetans in exile. In all the tributes I've been reading, the affection that friends and fans felt for this man are so moving.

Then, musically. Yauch was a third of the Beastie Boys. The symbiosis between these three men is one hundred percent part of their identity. They would trade off performing verses, and words, and syllables. I'm sure, over the years, performing their parts became a muscle memory, and now, it's bittersweet to listen to any Beastie Boys song, because MCA performed one third of it.

The remaining Beasties must be devastated. They had been friends and partners for over 30 years. They grew together, three bad brothers we know so well. They evolved from misogynistically rapping about "Girls" who do their laundry for them to penance by "[offering their] love and respect to the end" to "the mothers and the sisters and the wives and friends" in "Sure Shot."

I feel like I'm rambling, but it's been three weeks since Yauch died and I'm still blue about it. It's different from when Amy Winehouse died. She was just as important, musically and culturally, but she was a solo artist. I feel like a limb has been removed from the Beastie Boys. Two limbs. Or maybe just a piece of the heart.

Link: The Hollywood Reporter's nice compilation of regrets.

I'm so glad I got to see the Beastie Boys live when they were touring for To The Five Boroughs. They performed with such joy and energy! They seemed like they were having so much fun, rapping and dancing and playing, you could forget how good they were and how hard it is to do what they did so well. I'm mixing up past and present tense, I know, but I'm unsure of the group's future without Yauch.


Seeking solace through friends, I wrote a good man, Michał, telling him I was bummed, and he replied with exactly what I wanted to hear: "MCA. It hasn't sunk in yet, but if Ill Communication was any indication, he's with Buddha now. Or he is Buddha." It made me smile, and it made me happy. Thanks, Michał. Thanks, MCA.

Springtime At The 46th Parallel, In The Gulf.

PEI is greening up again. I’m sure spring is just lovely in most places that enjoys all four seasons, but there’s something sweet about spring on Prince Edward Island. The air is always sweet here, no matter what time of year it is. I know I’ve written about this in the past, but there’s a damp fullness to PEI air that is intoxicating, especially when one is arriving from a vast, dusty metropolis.

PEI’s soil is rich and red and absolutely glows in spring showers, but what you can really smell is last year’s mulching crops being munched by awoken worms. In April melting ice pours off the fields, dragging away nutrients and colour. I love watching the water run. I go out to Pownal and stand on the side of the road, my shoes squishing in the muddy grass, sun on my neck, fascinated by the lacy rivulets losing potential energy. I could watch them for hours.

Springtime is also a fantastic time to remind yourself that you’re never terribly far from farmland on PEI. Even on campus at UPEI there are times you whiff farm, and by “whiff farm,” I mean “smell shit.” Well, manure, technically, I suppose. I drove up West with my mum on Friday and I saw a farm implement I’d never seen before – it was like an automated manure flicker. It had a flat conveyer belt-buggy on the back of a tractor, which moved manure to the end of the buggy where a long rotating brush would catch the bit about to fall off the end and propel it in an arc onto the field.

Well, what I should address, I suppose, is how much I love the smell of manure*. To some, it may just be shit, but no – it’s fertility and tradition and home. I spent a lot of time between PEI and Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley when I was young, and farmers preparing their fields for their crops is a point of pride. I come from fertile soil**.

The grass is greening and the trees are budding their little yellow-green and rust-red buds. The crocuses are come and gone, and now daffodils and tulips are blooming alongside daylilies warming up their rhizomes. The ice is out of the harbor, the days are longer, and the salt trucks are parked for another seven or eight months. I’ll soon be reading on the deck and slinging tickets to tourists in town. Mum needs some help edging her flower beds while Dad sorts his gladiola bulbs, and I’ll sleep with the windows open, happy to be listening to screaming foxes.



*This love is not extended to liquid pig manure. That shit just straight-up reeks.

** Even Newfoundland, where I was born, has farms, of course, but I was rarely there in the spring, so mostly PEI and NS spring to mind when I whiff manure.

9/365.

I've been pinin' for Scotland lately. I was only there once, and it was for about a week-and-a-half, about 12 years ago, but I've been thinking about straight-up living there in the last couple of weeks. I expect it would be similar to Canada's East Coast, climate-wise, only maybe damper.

I've been stoking this fire by listening to The Proclaimers more. I know, I know... there are a lot of other Scottish bands I could be enjoying, and I know I've already profiled a song from another successful Scot band, Travis, but hey, I'm in a mood, ok? Back off.

I've chosen Letter From America for a few reasons.

It has excellent, inventive harmonies and great use of non-lead/non-lyrical, almost percussive vocals.

It uses some interesting tempo choices, too. It uses triplets at the end of the chorus ("Miami to Canada"). The triplet echoes a common tempo feature in celtic music. I love the use of triplets in pop music. Triplets always baffled me, but my life partner B. was never stymied by them. Damn him.

I am also a sucker for bittersweet stories, and leaving the homeland to travel to a far-away land for work is a story we're very familiar with on the East Coast. Nova Scotia is named so for a reason, for goodness sake! Immigrants came here and come here from abroad, and now, Atlantic Canadians are faced with the same issues: leaving home to find work further afield.

One thing I'm increasingly obsessed with is watching how active their mouths are when they make the [r] sound! Look how the tongues dance off the roof of the mouth!

A No-Win Sitch.

So, three times in the last three days I've called people out on spelling, pronunciation, or typographical errors.

To be fair, I was straight-up making fun of two of the three.

The third one, the pronunciation gaffe, was an FYI to a broadcaster. Twice, on two separate episodes, I had heard him pronounce "row" (as in an argument) the wrong way. He pronounced it as in what you do in a boat, or what you call lines of veggies in a garden, not rhyming with "cow," as it should. I assumed he'd only ever read the word and not heard it said in UK movies, TV shows, or on radio, etc., where it's more commonly used.

The problem is, how do you express genuine concern for a broadcaster's reputation without sounding like a know-it-all asshole? I tweeted him, too. Now that I think about it, I should have sent him a message instead. Not everyone had to read that.

The internet is such a rabbithole of assholery. The anonymity is problematic, I suppose. This broadcaster in particular is putting out a weekly (or bi-weekly) free, fun, funny, and informative podcast and I'm sitting in my PJs, consuming it. Why can't I just shut the hell up and let him say the wrong "row"?

I guess I could let other people tell him about this mistake. Or professionals in the industry. Why should I take it on? It's just... one of the times, he said it in front of David Tennant, and I know he wouldn't want to make that mistake. Not in front of Ten.

I'm not one of those people that would complain that he uses the word "adorbs" from time to time, even though sets my teeth on edge. I guess that's because it's not necessarily wrong, but rather a strange little selection from his personal lexicon*. Apparently people complain he says "awesome" too much. I'd never noticed.

ANYHOW. This dude is taping his hour-long stand-up special this weekend, which is a big deal for comedians, so I hope he kills. I do think he's doing great work.

Right. Anyhow, the other two corrections were to friends and they know I'm a dick about this stuff, so they can just shrug and roll their eyes and go back to loving me a second later. Hopefully.

* Dropping all but the first syllable of a word and adding an -s makes me happy, for some reason. Maybe because a friend used to always say "probs" instead of "probably." My high school students used to do it so awkwardly... so cute. It's like we're nick-naming words. Dave becomes Dafs. Betty becomes Betts. Jackie becomes Jax. Probably becomes probs. "Adorbs" is an exception. The sound "-orbs" is just so amusical. But I digress...

Northern Touch.

I am from Northern stock. I'm not talking just Canadian. I'm talking Scandinavian.

And not very far back, either. My great-grandparents on my maternal grandmother's side came from Sweden to Newfoundland in the last century.

My dad's family, we think, were Swedes, too, by way of England. In fact, we think my family name is anglicized "Swede."

This is all to say I should be more comfortable in the winters on the 46th parallel of Prince Edward Island. It should be in my blood.

Instead, I feel the cold straight to the bone. It's -15C today, and that's not including a 30km/h wind making the windchill painful. I've been in colder weather, but I'm just sayin'. Hella cold.

I would seek warmer climes, but unfortunately owing to my genetics, I am woefully deficient in melanin. I was born with pale blue eyes, light hair, blindingly white skin with freckles, and an acute sense of irony.